Why I still blog

This is my ninth year of blogging and I have just reached my 200th subscriber.

When I began blogging in June 2008 I managed to post nine posts in the first month. That’s heaps! I went back to browse them and was surprised – that I had written so much, but also that they were so short. These days I feel like everything I have to say needs so much explaining, so much backstory. It’s an occupational hazard. Writing lectures and research papers is wordy work, and that has truly seeped into all the other genres in my life.

Last weekend I was in Melbourne for VidCon, the first ever in Australia. It was amazing! More on that another time. And I met an excellent crowd of YouTube creators who are into education, and we had long and interesting talks. Getting to know each other, it was only when someone mentioned they have been blogging for a long time that I caught myself having not mentioned my blog. And I paused for thought. Then realised I hadn’t really, truly grasped the similarities between blogging (in which I am an old hand) and vlogging (in which I am a noob), until that moment.

(You mean I can transfer all this knowledge there? That is so darn handy right now.)

So, to articulate it for myself and others, here are the three big reasons why I still blog:

I use the blog as a professional journal to reflect on my practice.

I like to make a lot of my ideas and resources visible to others, because I trust the network and believe we are better when we share.

The blog is like a pensieve. Or a portable hard drive for my mind.

ICYMI – in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Albus Dumbledore describes the penseive like this:

“I use the Pensieve. One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one’s mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one’s leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form.”